Monday, October 17, 2011

Balloon "Pumpkin" Sort - An Even and Odd Game

The weather has us stuck inside again today, but there's snow in next week's forecast, so there is hope ahead for outdoor relief. In the meantime, I decided to mix some active play into the younger girls' math lesson.

We started out with a "pumpkin patch" of orange and green balloons numbered 1-10. I was short a couple of orange balloons to make 10, so some of our pumpkins weren't quite ripe.

The girls sorted them out, and we talked about how when we had an even number of pumpkins they could share them and both have the same number of pumpkins, but when we had an odd number, one girl always had more than the other.

Then we mixed the numbers up, and placed the balloons in the middle of the room, with the girls standing at opposite sides.

When I said go, E raced to gather all the evenly numbered pumpkins, while C gathered up the odds.

C (age 5) had trouble keeping odds and evens straight in her head during the competition, so I gave the girls cheat sheets to make things easier.

We played the game a number of times more, switching off between who was even and odd, and varying the way to collect the pumpkins, like using feet only...

...or blowing them across the room...

...and so on and so on, until the girls could remember with greater ease which numbers were even, and which were odd. Then, we gave up on math, and just had some fun free-play with the balloons to burn of the rest of their energy, before nap time.

I love this fun lesson. Sometimes I wish I had just one more child to play games like this with Selena, wait a minute, you know that was just a passing thought and is now long gone! Love your creativity!

About Me

I'm a homeschool mom of six. My family has been homeschooling for about seventeen years. And, each year, we've learned a little more about having fun, and spending less, while learning more. It's great to be a homeschooler!

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I'm very happy to share ideas, and thoughts with you. I try to give credit to others when they inspire, or add instructions to a project, and ask that you do the same for me. You may copy ideas and pictures from this blog as long as you give credit and link back to the original post. Thanks

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